Nursing home horrors

Abuse of the vulnerable is sickening

There is something very wrong with a society that allows its weakest and most vulnerable members to be preyed upon. But that is what is happening in many nursing homes across America. Male and female residents, many of them with dementia or other debilitating diseases, have been abused.

A CNN investigation found that more than 1,000 facilities have been cited for “mishandling or failing to prevent alleged cases of sexual assault at their facilities.”

Some of the cases are sickening, and inexplicable: An 83-year-old woman in Minnesota being ravaged by Alzheimer’s disease was raped by a nurse’s aide in the middle of the night. Her family later learned that the man had been suspended three other times for suspected assaults. In California, an 88-year-old woman was assaulted during the night and weeks later was diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease.

There is no way to know how rampant the abuse problem is because many of the victims have advanced stages of dementia and cannot identify their attackers or provide details about the assaults. Often the incidents are swept under the rug. In other cases, in order to prevent bad publicity, the assault is never reported.

But federal data document more than 16,000 cases of sexual abuse in long-term care facilities since 2000. That is an alarming number. Longterm care facilities need to abide by the Nursing Home Reform Act, which requires facilities participating in Medicare and Medicaid to meet quality of care standards. That